Mind, after all, is almost universally taken to be something inside us. That was Descartes’ view. Inside each of us there is a thing that thinks and feels. Each of us is identical to that thing. Neuroscience updates the picture by adding that that thing inside you that thinks and feels is your brain.

You are your brain!

What are the implications of such a view? One is that we inhabit our bodies as a submariner inhabits his or her vessel; the main function of the body is to transmit signals from the surrounding sea of stimulation to neural headquarters. And what of the world beyond the body? Well, it is nothing more than a sea of potential stimulation! And what of other people? These are nothing other than more-or-less persistent patterns in the flow of surrounding stimulation!

What an ugly idea!

…Let’s imagine a new possibility. Your brain is not the thing inside you that thinks and feels. Not because something immaterial does this work for you, but because nothing does. Thinking and feeling is not something that happens in you, not in your brain, or anywhere else. Consciousness is something you achieve. It is something you do, and like everything else you do, it depends on your embedding in and reliance on the world around you (including other people).

Trying to find consciousness in the brain — consider this! — would be like trying to find the value of money in the molecular structure of bank notes. And just as the fact that we can’t find the value of money using an electron microscope does not show that value is mysterious, the fact that we can’t find consciousness in the brain does not show that consciousness is somehow unnatural.

Well, first of all, monetary value is not a property of coins and dollar bills; those are just symbolic representations of value, which itself is abstract and symbolic. The brain on the other hand, is not symbolic of consciousness, and consciousness is very much an emergent property of the brain, so this metaphor kind of falls flat.

Other than that, he seems to just be playing fast and loose with the definition of who “you” are. It is, of course, obviously true that we, as conventionally defined individuals, don’t exist in a vacuum. As Nietzsche said in response to Kant’s concept of the Ding-an-sich:

The properties of a thing are effects on other “things”:

if one removes other “things”, then a thing has no properties,

i.e., there is no thing without other things,

i.e., there is no “thing-in-itself”.

You, Joe/Josephine Blogreader, are a physical product of your parents’ DNA, and all the air, food and water that have maintained you since birth. Mentally, the thoughts you think are conditioned by the culture you live in and the language you speak, both of which are organic processes in constant evolution, with countless contributions along the way from countless people. So in that sense, yes, you are not simply a self-contained, unchanging, timeless observer peering out from the fortress of your body at a world filled with dead matter and likewise separate observers. “You” wouldn’t exist without “everything else”, as a lengthy stay in a sensory deprivation tank would make clear.

However, your individual brain is the nexus, the crossroads in time, where all these physical and cultural elements come together to form unique and unrepeatable combinations of experience. Remove or severely damage that, and there won’t be anyone “doing” or “achieving” consciousness on any level. No other conventionally defined individual will have the same thoughts you do at the same time about the same events as viewed from the same perspective. No one else will ever have the precise experience that you have, informed by the same history, at 3:18 on Wednesday afternoon next week. Understanding this does not imply a life of empty, spiritual barrenness or any of the other clichés he trots out, just as understanding the former perspective does not imply mental peace and bliss. You can fully grasp that life itself, the great process, the Tao, the “I know not what” will continue on after absorbing all of our temporary individual selves back into itself and still feel a pang of wistfulness at the thought of your individual perspective, limited as it is, coming to an end at some point.

But the summer’s events show that the defense of unthreatened freedoms counts for less than an apparently widespread white wish to make more out of their difficulties than other people. This is no longer a culture war, a revolt of stoics against the “culture of complaint,” but something deeper and older that precedes the identity politics movements it aims to subvert. Forty-two years after the Civil Rights Act, white people who still think of themselves predominantly as “white people” want to air their grievances with the aid of a social movement. One half of what passes for American two-party discourse calls now for another rebirth of a nation: the Caucasian States of America, a postmodern ethno-nationalist republic.

…But it’s futile to insist on nuances of history and law when we’re speaking the language of “offense.” The mythical heartland Sarah Palin speaks from, or for, is full of these voiceless, downtrodden plain folk who are constantly being offended, for whom there is no end to the offenses, real or imagined, perpetrated against them: the Mexican immigrant speaking his native tongue, the Muslim at his prayers, the black man drinking from a public water fountain (oh wait, that one’s not offensive anymore . . .). One of the more charming stories in Budiansky’s history of Reconstruction concerns a Southern gentleman who wanted a freed slave whipped because he had the temerity to wish him “good morning” without being spoken to first. These offended people see with such dreadful clarity things that don’t exist, and so remake reality to suit their grievances.

…While not even Sarah Palin would suggest that we bring back slavery, the ferocity of the right-wing opposition to the disappointingly moderate technocratic policies of this Democratic administration cannot be explained in merely strategic legislative or electoral terms. It’s about more than winning elections for people like Arizona Senator Jon Kyl, who, as part of a plan to intimidate undocumented immigrants, recently called for the repeal of the 14th Amendment, which granted citizenship to former slaves; it’s about rewriting American history as the travails of a trod-upon Caucasian nation.

Right on cue, here comes Victor Davis Handjob with an extended pout on the topic of persecution, i.e., having to suffer the indignity of being challenged on one’s opinions, advising people on “what to keep quiet about.” Given that I would happily part with a kidney, a lung, and a testicle if only the people I personally know who share his opinions could grant me a few moments of blessed silence each day, rather than thundering indignantly and incessantly like Archie Bunker somehow magically transported atop Mount Sinai, I have to suspect that Vic is employing sarcasm here. Yes, I’m afraid so. I fear he doesn’t actually want his fellows to remain silent at all, but rather to redouble their efforts to pummel their opponents into submission with righteously angry sound waves, invigorated by the tonic of Pseudo-Martyr® energy drinks.

Seriously, though, I’ve never known people who have it so good, yet are so firmly convinced that the entire world is crumbling around them. I would actually welcome the impending Republican midterm victories if I didn’t already know from my experience of the first eight years of this decade that being in control doesn’t make them any less prone to whining about their victimhood; it just makes them have to stretch harder to invent examples, with the additional effort apparently serving to make them even more cantankerous.

Because of the limits on his funds, Bazalgette could afford to take the sewage only as far as the eastern edge of the metropolis, to a place called Barking Reach. There mighty outfall pipes disgorged 150 million gallons of raw, lumpy, potently malodorous sewage into the Thames each day. Barking was still twenty miles from the open sea, as the dismayed and unfortunate people all along those twenty miles never stopped pointing out, but the tides were vigorous enough to haul most of the discharge safely (if not always odorlessly) out to sea, and ensured that there were never again any sewage-related epidemics in London.

The new sewage outfalls did, however, have an unfortunate role in the greatest tragedy ever experienced on the Thames. In September 1878, a pleasure boat named the Princess Alice, packed to overflowing with day-trippers, was returning to London after a day at the seaside, when it collided with another ship at Barking at the very place and moment when the two giant outfall pipes surged into action. The Princess Alice sank in less than five minutes. Nearly eight hundred people drowned in a choking sludge of raw sewage. Even those who could swim found it nearly impossible to make headway through the glutinous filth. For days afterward bodies bobbed to the surface. Many, the Times reported, were so bloated with gaseous bacteria that they wouldn’t fit into normal coffins.

People have been pointing to natural disasters as proof against the existence of a loving God for centuries. What moral lesson can be drawn from mass destruction and casualties following an earthquake? What does the “free will” justification so often used to explain evil in the world have to do with fires and floods?

That kind of suffering is bad enough, but I wonder why events like this don’t get similar attention. After all, this isn’t just a case of needless death on a grand scale. It’s almost like this was designed to additionally inflict the maximum loss of dignity just for the sheer, gratuitous hell of it. But if it was designed, rather than symbolic of an uncaring universe, you’d have to conclude that God is one seriously disturbed motherfucker. Or even more terrifying, perhaps God is something like a character from a Mike Myers or Wayans brothers movie gone stark raving mad, forcing humankind to endure real-life toilet humor just to make Him giggle.

Not to diminish what an overstuffed sack of shit Clint McCance is, but I have to say that I’m glad to see some honesty for a change, and none of this mealy-mouthed “hate the sin, love the sinner” bullshit.

Speaking of which, I like the part about how his kids will have “solid Christian beliefs”. Maybe he might want to consider something E.L Greggory noticed.

We all approach literature with a slight narcissistic perspective. We can’t help but read our own lives and experiences into the story. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with that. When we discussed Albert Camus’s The Fall in philosophy class, the part that grabbed my adolescent self by the lapels and shook me was the section on pp. 31-32 about friendship, and the line that burned itself into my brain right then and there was, “Who, cher monsieur, will sleep on the floor for us?” At the time, I was watching many of my friends go off to college or careers, wondering if I was ever going to see some of them again, wondering if there were any relationships in my life that would withstand a long separation of time and distance. I was already concerned with a theme that still preoccupies me today; namely, that of trying to create a life that allows time for something besides working and consuming, while fearing that doing so might mean cutting myself off from some of the people I wanted to share it with.

Safe to say that wasn’t exactly the main theme of the book. But nonetheless, I wanted to read more by a man who could reach into my brain like that, pluck out an inchoate thought, and articulate it in such a poetic way. And while Dostoevsky is certainly a more complex writer than I gleaned at the time, it was his clear, uncompromising portrayal of Ivan Karamazov’s refusal to accept a God and heaven built on the needless suffering of innocents that galvanized that same idealistic, adolescent self and made me want to better understand a mind that could envision such an outlook. I entered through a narrow individual perspective, but doing so led me to much wider considerations.

Which, in a roundabout way, brings me to my point. I recently read a paragraph from an Alan Watts lecture that touched on a recurring theme of his, one that has since been taken up by numerous people determined to believe that all religious traditions are basically stating the same eternal truths in their own idiosyncratic ways:

One day A gets furious at its natural enemy B and says, “Let us obliterate B.” They gather their forces and knock out their enemy. After a while, they begin to get weak and overpopulated. There is nobody around to eat up their surplus members, and they do not have to keep their muscles strong to defend against an enemy. They begin to fall apart because they have destroyed their enemy, and they remember that what they should do is cultivate the enemy. That is the real meaning of “Love your enemy.” There is such a thing as a beloved enemy. If the flies and spiders did not have each other, there would be either too many spiders or too many flies. These balances maintain the course of nature. It is exactly the same with the libertines and the prudes. They need each other.

Watts spent a lot of time trying to reconcile a liberal form of Christianity to the Eastern philosophy he preferred before reluctantly concluding that the exclusivity of Christian dogma made it ultimately futile, but he still kept this philosopher-Jesus on hand for frequent reference, as so many people do who want to believe that the inspiration himself would want nothing to do with what’s been done in his name. As it happens, I was just talking about this with Noel, one of the denizens I keep chained in the comment section to provide me with repartee — religious myths are, by their nature, not supposed to provide us with objective truths. They poetically express common themes that apply to the experience of specific groups, or sometimes humanity as a whole, and different people can derive different lessons from them depending on their circumstances. But Christianity is built on the assertion that an individual human, at a very specific point in time, did in fact perform certain historical acts for the benefit of those who willingly believe the story. Biblical scholarship indicates that Jesus, to whatever extent any historical information can be known about him, very much believed in a Manichean state of affairs in which good would eventually obliterate evil, not coexist with it. Now, I agree that Watts’s interpretation of the saying is a good and useful one. But it’s simply not accurate to project that interpretation backward, and as I keep saying, it’s a waste of time to try and reinvent Christianity as an allegorical fable when the majority of believers have accepted its historical claims and expect definite results at some point in the future.

It would have been silly and dishonest for me to pretend that those novels were written specifically for me as a nineteen year-old while ignoring the authors’ perspectives and motivations, and it’s no less so for people to treat religious texts in the same way. Take whatever you want away from them, but don’t forget that not all perspectives are equally valid.

Barack Obama invited some special friends for a first-of-its-kind, in-person White House chat today: liberal bloggers who are always mean to him! And the first report back suggests that they discussed Obama’s legislative strategy for repealing DADT. He has one!

Really? That’s the big, breaking news from this meeting of the minds? Given a chance to bend the president’s ear for a few minutes, this is the issue you would focus on? Sigh. And these are the people who, with no trace of irony or self-awareness, will turn around and boast about being Dirty Fucking Hippies.

I’ll never understand this mainstream progressive conviction that one of the best things we can do to help gay people is to make it easier to stick more of them in starchy uniforms, press a weapon into their hands, and send them off to our imperial outposts. IOZ once noted that it’s a testament to the inessential nature of much of our military activity that we can afford to discriminate at all; if we were actually in a life-or-death struggle to defend the homeland, rather than occupy someone else’s for dubious reasons, we would damn sure make vital use of anyone capable of standing up straight and uncrossing their eyes long enough to aim a rifle. Then again, given all the salacious details we keep learning from Wikileaks about the grim reality of militarily occupying a country whose inhabitants don’t want you there, maybe this push to repeal DADT is rooted in the conviction that a group of people who by and large are habitually accustomed to the necessity of discretion and circumspection would be invaluable when it comes to keeping secrets from the wider public. Come on out of the closet, all you would-be warriors, Uncle Sam needs the storage space for all these piles of Iraqi and Afghan bones!

At any rate, I make no claims to being an especially original thinker, but I was starting to feel a bit like a voice in the wilderness for my belief that while discrimination against gays is surely bad on the face of it, there might just be more important issues to consider here, a forest-and-the-trees situation, if you will. So I’m glad to see John Caruso, Radley Balko and Mr. Fish adding their voices to what should be a chorus of the obvious.

I was reading yet another positive review of Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows and wondering if anyone was ever going to point out the fucking obvious. So thank you, Evgeny Morozov:

Had Carr looked beyond the neuroscience, he may have found that many of the problems that he blames on the Internet — constant busyness, shrinking attention spans, less and less time for concentration and contemplation — are rooted in the nature of working and living under modern capitalism rather than in information technology or gadgetry per se. In fact, as Pinker correctly points outs, Carr’s are very old complaints.

Exhibit A: back in 1881 the prominent New York City physician George Beard published “American Nervousness”, a book about the sudden epidemic of “nervousness” sweeping America, which he blamed, in part on the telegraph and the daily newspaper (the book later proved a great influence on Freud).

Exhibit B: in 1891, almost 120 years before The Atlantic published Carr’s “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”, the same magazine ran “Journalism and Literature”, an essay by the polymath William Stillman, where he attacked the cultural change enabled by the telegraph-enabled journalism much in the same vein that Carr attacks the Internet. Stillman complained that “we develop hurry into a deliberate system, skimming of surfaces into a science, the pursuit of novelties and sensations into the normal business of our lives”.

The Internet may be amplifying each of these problems, but it surely did not cause them. When the famed sociologist Manuel Castells speaks of the “black holes of information capitalism”, there is as much emphasis on “capitalism” as there is on “information”.

If anyone ever listened to me, I’d have probably bored them to death by now as often as I go on about this, but all of our techno-gadgetry fetishes are merely a symptom of a restless mentality that sacralizes work and accomplishment. We’ve been hearing for a couple centuries that new inventions would relieve us of most of the drudge work that made our lives so punishing…and they did! The problem was, and still is, that we just invent new things to do with all the time we saved, and we expect our gadgets to let us do them all at once. No one knows how to stop and say enough is enough, and quite possibly, they instinctively fear discovering how empty they are even if they did.

The part I found most amusing in the review is that she had to download a ten-dollar program that turns your computer off for you for however long you specify. The idea being, restarting it is such a huge chore that you’ll be less likely to just aimlessly drift back online out of habit. I can’t help but think that if you’re so undisciplined that you can’t turn the computer off yourself and walk away to do other things, maybe you should take that ten bucks and go pay someone to teach you how to sit zazen. That’s been shown to rearrange neural pathways as well!

The creep has the respect of the geek, but cannot — usually by choice — enter geek society. The creep can even be social with nerds and non-nerds alike, but if you meet a creep you will feel an impenetrable wall around him. There are, obviously, far fewer creeps than geeks. The creep is usually a man of few words —that’s part of what makes him creepy. The creep is a creature of extremes: for instance, the creep is more likely than other nerds to be a complete teetotaler, but the creep is also more likely to be a severe alcoholic. The creep may have a mild autism-spectrum disorder, such as Asperger’s. The creep is far more likely than the geek to be politically conservative. Libertarianism is an especially popular political sympathy among creeps. The overwhelming majority of creeps are male, though there are anecdotal accounts of female creeps.

Identifying characteristics

Distant, scary look in eyes. Otherwise, most creeps dress and behave much like ordinary people. Creeps usually have no sense of humor: they do not tell jokes or laugh, unless to express derision.

Mating habits

We’re not saying it has never happened, but there has never been a confirmed incident of a creep having sex with another creep. However, the male creep may sometimes have a certain sexual allure to female nerds and non-nerds alike. Often the creep seems entirely asexual—or worse, to have secret sexual proclivities far “kinkier” than the silly and self-congratulatory “kink” of the dork.

Where to find them

Your IT department; houses with Ron Paul campaign signs on lawns; suspiciously sitting alone at unusual times of day in public parks.

Quintessential creep

Theodore Kaczynski, AKA the “Unabomber”

Nervous chuckle. Strained gulp. Um…I’m not politically conservative! My whole blog is a running joke! And doesn’t quoting four different bands in one post add a healthy dollop of “geek” to the mixture?

The U.S. said Iran shouldn’t interfere with Afghanistan’s internal affairs following a report that an Iranian official gave an aide of President Hamid Karzai a bag filled with packets of euro bills.

“We understand that Iran and Afghanistan are neighbors and will have a relationship,” Philip J. Crowley, a State Department spokesman, said in an e-mailed statement “But Iran should not interfere with the internal affairs of the Afghan government.”

I write in my notebook with the intention of stimulating good conversation, hoping that it will also be of use to some fellow traveler. But perhaps my notes are mere drunken chatter, the incoherent babbling of a dreamer. If so, read them as such.

Vox Populi

The prose is immaculate. [You] should be an English teacher…Do keep writing; you should get paid for it, but that’s hard to find.

—Noel

You are such a fantastic writer! I’m with Noel; your mad writing skills could lead to income.

—Sandi

WOW – I’m all ready to yell “FUCK YOU MAN” and I didn’t get through the first paragraph.

—Anonymous

You strike me as being too versatile to confine yourself to a single vein. You have such exceptional talent as a writer. Your style reminds me of Swift in its combination of ferocity and wit, and your metaphors manage to be vivid, accurate and original at the same time, a rare feat. Plus you’re funny as hell. So, my point is that what you actually write about is, in a sense, secondary. It’s the way you write that’s impressive, and never more convincingly than when you don’t even think you’re writing — I mean when you’re relaxed and expressing yourself spontaneously.

—Arthur

Posts like yours would be better if you read the posts you critique more carefully…I’ve yet to see anyone else misread or mischaracterize my post in the manner you have.

—Battochio

You truly have an incredible gift for clear thought expressed in the written word. You write the way people talk.